


Undone, Redone

by mousemind



Category: Silicon Valley (TV)
Genre: M/M, brief mentions of mental breakdowns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-04
Updated: 2016-05-04
Packaged: 2018-06-06 06:43:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6743578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mousemind/pseuds/mousemind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Richard begins looking for small homes out state, Jared's heart sinks, but he is nonetheless thrilled to help.</p><p>Jared makes a few phone call inquiries while Richard packs his belongings into boxes. He fields the calls from a handful of brokers. He lets Richard lean over his shoulder and scroll through photos on his laptop of available real estate.</p><p>It only follows, Jared reasons, that he helps Richard move. The only surprise, then, is when Richard asks Jared to stay, just a little longer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Undone, Redone

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this prompt](http://siliconvalleykink.dreamwidth.org/1066.html?thread=185642#cmt185642) which I absolutely couldn't refuse.

Jared checks his phone once more, feeling the imagined, phantom vibration of an unsent text. With a small tut of disappointment - more self-directed than anything - he turns his phone off and slips it back into his front pocket.

"Hey," a small voice rasps. Jared snaps up to attention. Richard shuffles towards him in the same hoodie he'd seen him wearing the day he'd been dropped off.

"Richard," he says, springing to his feet. "Are you - ?"

Richard nods, somewhat jerkily.

"Yeah," he replies, ducking his head. He seems embarrassed, perhaps. Ashamed. He circles the wrist of his left arm and rubs three times, sharp and deliberate, before dropping his arms to his sides again.

"Do you need to pick up anything before I drive you home? Groceries? Something from work? A prescription?"

At those words, Richard hisses through his teeth, almost reflexively.

"Nope," he snaps. "Just want to go home." 

Jared checks in with the nurse at the front desk that Richard is all clear for discharge, speaking as quietly and discreetly as possible. Richard walks very closely beside him out into the parking lot, blinking owlishly into the bright, mid-day sun. As Jared pushes the keys into the ignition, Richard clears his throat.

"Are you in a rush," Richard asks, with a strange, hollow sort of impassivity.

"No, Richard, I cleared my day for you," Jared answers. He bites back a sudden pang of uncharacteristic remorse with a well-concealed wince. He doesn't want Richard to feel worse, like Jared has changed anything about his life to accommodate him. Richard doesn't need to know that between Erlich and himself, they'd managed to keep his remote family informed about Richard's breakdown and subsequent admission to the hospital. He doesn't need to know that despite being turned away - not immediate family, no relation to Richard besides "work colleague" -  Jared had visited to stay abreast of his situation for the last three days, for multiple hours at a time.

"I'm um," Richard begins, chewing at his bottom lip. "I'm actually pretty hungry. If that's okay."  
  
"Let's get you whatever you want," Jared replies, amenably. "Anything at all." 

Richard's lip twitches, just barely. Not unlike a smile, Jared thinks, hopefully.

"A burger sounds good," Richard muses, and Jared starts the car.

\--- 

Jared walks Richard up to his condo and unlocks Richard's front door. Richard, for his part, raises an eyebrow but seems mostly unsurprised.  
  
"Erlich has a spare set of keys," Jared says, a bit contrite. "He always said, in case of an emergency..."

"In case Richard loses his fucking mind. Yeah," Richard huffs, throwing his hoodie over the back of his living room couch. He rubs his left wrist again, three times, and then pulls his hand away quickly.

"No, Richard," Jared begins, as carefully as possible. "It's just -- well, you know how Erlich cares."

"What does Erlich know. About, um. My - " Richard stutters a bit, searching for the proper word. "My admittance." 

"Everything," Jared answers, watching the way Richard crumples, his face contorting in what almost looks like pain.

"He was instrumental in getting you the right care, keeping the appropriate people informed." He pauses for a moment, wondering the most polite way to describe Erlich's near-vicious guard-dogging. "And also, keeping people out."

"Who knows?" asks Richard, collapsing on his couch.

"Not many, thanks to Erlich," Jared hedges, carefully, taking a seat an appropriate distance away from Richard's boneless hunch, long legs akimbo, one arm thrown above his head, the other slung over his eyes. Richard exhales once, long and raspy around the edges, until it seems like he's stopped breathing altogether. Finally, he asks in an almost frightened voice.

"Will they let me back? At Pied Piper?"

"Yes," Jared answers instantly. "They have to."  

Richard laughs a little, soft but cutting. Quickly, Jared adds, "And they would want you, even if it wasn't a matter of legality."

Richard's breath hitches as he shifts on the couch, sitting up and turning away from Jared, his legs drawn up tight against his chest. Jared, against all better judgement, aches to reach out to him. Aches to hold him close, or smooth down his messy hair, or pull off his ratty old hoodie and help him into something clean and new. Instead, Jared sits patiently and waits for Richard to say anything at all.

"What's the point," Richard muses, with an undercurrent of disgust. "I'm toxic. I blew it."

"You have not," Jared defends, wholeheartedly. "People will understand. Things like this happen all the time."

 "Not to people like me," Richard says, shaking his head. "One fuck up on top of another -- "

"You are such an asset to this company," Jared counters, passionately, "this company that _you_ created." 

"There is no one there that wouldn't rather see my job filled by somebody else," Richard snaps. There's an unusual waver in his voice, a watery sort of hoarseness that lets Jared know, despite Richard's closed, turned away posture, that he's crying. 

"I don't know how to speak to people. I dress like shit. I don't get asked to do interviews anymore, because I look so stupid and sweaty on camera - "

"Richard," Jared attempts to placate, to little success. "I didn't know you felt this way."

"Of course you didn't," Richard wheezes, breathlessly. "I'm not allowed to admit that I feel it!"

Richard heaves, once, almost violently. Jared can't tell if he's going to be ill, but still moves towards him, nervously, reverently. Richard, instead, leaps to his feet, and paces the room. He makes no attempt to hide his tear-streaked face, all red and splotchy, his eyes still hooded and bruise-dark from lack of sleep. 

"I can't be a nervous wreck," Richard rambles. "I already look like a kid even though I'm pushing thirty, and can explain our tech better than anyone else but get outshone and battered down by any member of our sales team. I'm already an embarrassment. I can't also be a fuck up. I'm not young enough to be held up as some whiz-kid anymore, but I don't know how to act like Jack Barker, or Monica -- or _you_."

Jared recoils, slightly, despite his practiced, professional veneer.

"Me?"

"You, Jared, you," Richard insists, tearfully. "Even when things go to shit around you, I've never seen you miss a day of work. And you speak well and you dress nicely and you're always on time and you don't forget what you're trying to say in a board meeting because someone says something to you that feels -- I don't know -- demeaning. Or something."

Richard scowls at his own admission and grabs his wrist again, almost viciously this time, with a force that looks like it could bruise. 

"Maybe they say something that you don't stop thinking about for the next three days until you're convinced it's true. Maybe you start telling it to yourself in the mirror in the morning because it's better to believe it's true rather than imagine it's just something people say about you behind your back and you're too delusional to see it."

Jared stands, slowly, like Richard might startle at any moment.

"Richard," he says, so quietly it's almost lost under the sound of Richard's heaving, stuttering inhalations. "Whatever you think -- it isn't true."

"It is, though," Richard answers, with an empty sort of resignation. "I had a breakdown, Jared. The doctors said I was hysterical. _Hysterical._ "

He repeats the word with an ugly kind loathing; something Jared recognizes and fears, though he's embarrassed to admit it. Despite his overwhelming admiration for Richard, there is an angry, spiteful streak in Richard, just beneath the surface. A hateful streak he sees most often turned inward, against himself. 

"It means everything they ever said about me. Feared about me. They were right."

Jared is overcome with something that feels like pity, though not quite. Pity sounds ugly, sounds condescending, sounds like the pearl-clutching but largely ineffective way people used to look at him when he'd say, "no, she's my foster mother" or "my emergency contact is my CPS agent, Mrs. Montanez."

Instead, what Jared feels doesn't have a name, but it is bone-deep, and profound. It is equal parts a desire to protect and shelter, pressed up alongside a desire to admit to everything dark and frightening and devastating about himself.

"It's so embarrassing," Richard keens. "That was my best. That was the best I can do."

Jared steps towards him and touches Richard's shoulder, gently.

"Richard," he says, before realizing he has nothing else to say. Instead he moves closer, threads his arms around Richard's torso.

Richard doesn't pull away, but he doesn't hug back, either.

"Is this okay," Jared asks, at length.

"Yeah," Richard says. Jared feels Richard's tears splattering on his shoulder, but hardly minds. Richard hiccups, catching his breath.

"Yeah," Richard repeats, quieter this time, lifting one hand and placing it, lightly, on Jared's hip.

\---

Jared stays the night - as his own insistence - on Richard's couch. Richard's apartment is clearly quite nice, a bit Eco-Conscious Contemporary with wood paneling and high, white ceilings, but still haphazardly decorated in Richard's dorm-life style. His old posters are framed now, but hung without real thought in their positioning; the shelves strewn with tchotchkes, not messy, but busy. He doesn't sleep well, but he can hear Richard breathing deeply through his cracked door, and that's enough to fill him with a strange sort of peace. 

The next morning, he makes breakfast, and Richard eats so ravenously that Jared makes seconds. 

It begins as a sort of off-handed statement about returning to work, that Richard could easily seek another job. He wouldn't have to transition immediately. He has enough in savings from working as CTO of Pied Piper for three years.

Plus, if he left... if he cashed in his shares, vested his interest...

Jared calculates the total pretty quickly, and claims he's lowballing, as a conservative estimate. Richard's jaw goes slack, he puts his fork down beside his plate.

"Is that true," Richard asks, not quite meeting Jared's eyes.

Yes, Jared assures. But I can find out for certain, if you'd like.

It's even more than they expected in the end, when Pied Piper stock is taken into account. Richard resigns no more than two days later.

\---

When Richard begins looking for small homes out state, Jared's heart sinks, but he is nonetheless thrilled to help.

Then, Richard mentions the Ozarks - someplace quiet and remote but not too far from his family - Jared elaborates on spending time hiking mountains in Utah when he was a teenager, and how it brought him immense solace, peace of mind.  

Jared makes a few phone call inquiries while Richard packs his belongings into boxes. He fields the calls from a handful of brokers. He lets Richard lean over his shoulder and scroll through photos on his laptop of available real estate. 

It only follows, Jared reasons, that he helps Richard move. That he helps Richard close his bank accounts and lease his condo, pack the car, drive him east over the course of two long days. The house - halfway up a mountain - is small, but surprisingly open, spacious. There is no furniture, nothing on the walls, the heat and power not yet set up and the cell service abysmal. 

In turn, it doesn't surprise him that Richard, blushingly, asks for help buying furniture, looking for a mattress, getting the utilities set up. They sleep on air mattresses in the empty living room, eat peanut butter sandwiches sitting cross-legged on the floor of the kitchen. 

It takes them three days and Richard, uncharacteristically, is up before the sun, up even before Jared. Richard's face gets flushed in the wind and chill, a sort of unfamiliar hearty glow about him. He sits and ponderously looks out of the large, bay window overlooking a craggy, green mountain slope. It gives Jared peace that Richard seems calmer, seems almost happy, if not still a little shaken.

The only surprise, then, is when Richard asks Jared to stay, just a little longer.

"As long as you want," Richard clarifies, looking away, his rubbing at his left wrist again, like when Jared had picked him up at the hospital in Palo Alto. "If it isn't - I mean - if it's not going to ruin anything." 

Jared agrees, instantly. He hardly gives it a second thought. Despite Jared's insistence that the couch will do, they buy a second bed for Jared, which goes in the sunny guest room at the back of the house.

"In case you ever come back to visit someday," Richard says. Jared would almost call his tone 'hopeful' if he didn't feel so guilty about projecting his own desires onto Richard's clearly fragile, tentative emotional state.

\---

They make a nice home, together.

Not together, Jared needs to remind himself, almost scoldingly. They make a nice home for Richard. A home for Richard, alone. 

It is so remarkably close to the most inner, most secret fantasies Jared has ever entertained, it sometimes feel like exposing a raw nerve. Picking out bedding, building a bookcase, cooking a meal together. Jared sometimes reads aloud from a book until Richard dozes off on the couch. Richard teaches Jared card games and silly slight-of-hand tricks he used to practice with Big Head in high school.

The two of them video chat with Richard's family, all huddled around a computer together somewhere in Tulsa. They show off his new place, and his family reacts appreciatively. Before they hang up, Richard's mother says,

"Jared, I don't know how we can repay you."

"I - " Jared stutters, going red. "What is there to repay? It's my pleasure." 

Richard squeezes Jared's knee, beside him. It's a brief, searing-hot moment that neither of them can explain, but over in an instant. Jared is too embarrassed and frightened to bring it up again. Richard behaves much the same.

\---

"What do you think of this," Richard asks, rounding the aisle with a large blanket half draped over his shoulder. Jared touches the fabric and nods.

"Very nice. It'll certainly keep you warm when winter comes."

"Yeah, I like it," Richard continues. "Do you?"

Jared smiles, his nose wrinkling as he squints back at Richard.

"Surely, but does it matter? It's for you, after all."

Richard inadvertently jerks away from Jared, nodding. He moves to touch his wrist, but his hands are full.

"Yeah," Richard says, in a tone Jared can't quite discern. "Yeah, you're right."

Richard tosses it into their shopping cart and walks quickly away. 

\---

In three weeks, a work emergency arises that calls Jared back to Palo Alto. Richard says goodbye to him in the kitchen, and again on the front steps, and then a final time from outside Jared's car window. It's not like Richard to be so interested in Jared's itinerary, but he supposes Richard might be a little tentative to live alone again after the recent ordeal.

Richard doesn't call. Richard sends no texts. Jared, in turn, gives him his silence. Jared is embarrassed to admit it, but he feels a bit shellshocked coming out of his quiet, strangely blissfully domestic solitude. Richard feels like a good dream, shucked away in the morning light, becoming more and more a vague memory the more he is cast back into work. Despite his best intentions, he calls Richard after a week and a half, his curiosity (and Erlich's, as well) getting the best of him. 

"Things have quieted down here," he explains. "I just wanted to check in, see how you were doing."

"When are you coming back," Richard blurts out.

"Oh," Jared gasps, fidgeting in his chair. "I didn't -- I didn't think you wanted me to come back."

"Yeah," Richard huffs into the receiver, making the connection go all crackly for a moment. "That was. Yeah. That's stupid of me. Of course you're busy. You have a job and - "

There's an odd, shifting sound on the other line, like Richard had thrown the phone aside, or shoved it into his pocket.

"Richard?" He asks into the static. "Do you need me to come back?"

He gets no response. He vaguely hears Richard murmuring to himself on the other end.

"Do you need me to come back, Richard," he repeats, a little more firmly.

"No," Richard answers. "I'm okay."

Jared bites his bottom lip, briefly wonders if he'll regret saying what he is about to ask.

"Do you _want_ me to come back?"

There's a long silence, almost interminable, until Richard rasps,

"Yeah." 

\---

Jared drives through the night and pulls up around seven the next morning. Richard is already awake, opening the door for Jared before he even knocks.

"Oh," Jared exclaims, as the door swings open. Richard is shockingly unfamiliar to him, having grown a surprisingly full, copper beard in his absence, wearing a loose, olive green t-shirt that Jared suddenly recognizes as one of his own. He must have left it - hardly even realized - doesn't even know where Richard found it. It strikes him as both odd and impossibly endearing; a strange cry for help and, yet, a lovely, comforting image plucked straight from one of his most secret fantasies.

Richard touches his own cheek, apologetically.

"Yeah," Richard mutters. "I, um. I don't usually - " 

"You look good," Jared says, like the words are surprised out of him. Richard smiles, his lips tight but his eyes bright, and helps Jared take his suitcase inside.

\---

Richard still shaves that evening. Jared watches him from the doorway, leaning against the door jamb, almost hypnotized by the repetitive motions, by the long, pale curve of Richard's neck.

"That's better," Richard says as he finishes, his voice thin, clenched around some repressed emotion.

"Were you all right," Jared asks finally, "when I was away?"

Richard towels off his hands in silence, turned away.

"I don't know," Richard answers, with a notable heaviness. 

"Do I -- " Jared begins, his voice tapering off as he is overcome with embarrassment. "Oh, Richard, I'm afraid to say - "

Richard turns to face him, strangely bold in the resolute set of his shoulders, in the determined clench of his jaw.

"Say it, Jared," he entreats. "Please."

"Do I make you happy?" Jared asks.

"Yes," Richard answers, immediately, stepping closer. Jared can smell the lingering shaving cream and that smell - soft and woody like freshly-sharpened pencils - that is innately, wonderfully, just Richard.

Richard reaches out and touches Jared's collarbone with remarkable, unfamiliar gentleness. He touches him like he expects Jared to startle, to yank away.

"I can't ask you to live here," Richard says, a dark sort of forlornness etching into his otherwise placid expression. 

"Why not?" 

"Because it isn't fair," Richard explains, pulling away and grabbing his wrist in that familiar way, rubbing at it viciously. "I would feel -- shit, Jared, I'd feel terrible. You can't give it all up for me."

"What would I be giving up?" Jared insists. He laughs a little, despite himself, at the wonderful, impossible events of the night. He pulls Richard's hand away from his left wrist and threads his fingers between Richard's own. "Richard, the only reason I stayed at Pied Piper is because of you." 

Jared would be mortified to admit the amount of times he'd dreamed about kissing Richard Hendricks. Not once, in any of those brief and illuminating little respites from his daily life, did Richard kiss him first.

It is probably the only time in Jared's life that his reality surpasses his fantasy.

\--- 

Richard stifles a small cry into Jared's shoulder as Jared presses into him, one hand grasping at his hip, the other at the mattress beside him.

"Are you all right," Jared whispers, pulling back to look at Richard. Richard nods, jerkily, his eyes screwed shut. Jared strokes his cheek, gently, assuringly, with the back of his hand.

"Jared," Richard croaks, "There isn't -- there isn't a single thing in my life I haven't fucked up."

"Shh," Jared says. He begins rocking, gently, into Richard. Richard throws back his head and moans, his eyes snapping open.

"Is this good?"

"Yes," Richard gasps. He tangles a hand in Jared's hair. "You're so good. God, Jared, you're so good."

"I won't leave," Jared assures, pressing a kiss into the soft, tender space just beneath Richard's jaw. 

"Thank you," Richard whimpers. "Thank you, thank you..."

They spend very little time outside of bed for the next day or two. Jared would think to feel guilty, if he weren't so blissfully, wondrously relieved.

Not long after, Richard, unprompted and unexpectedly, says "I love you" over breakfast. Jared immediately drops a plate and gasps,

"I'm sorry! Oh, god, I'm sorry." 

"Did you hear me," Richard says, completely ignoring the mess between them. He wrings his hands nervously. "Jared? I said I love you?"

"I love you," Jared answers, bowled over with disbelief that these are words he's allowed to say here, in this lifetime. Richard steps over the broken plate carefully.

"This is so embarrassing but that day, when you picked me up at the hospital," Richard begins, his voice drawn tight. "I saw you waiting for me and thought, 'when Jared falls in love with someone, he's going to be so good to them.' I was jealous of that person. Whoever they were going to be."

"I loved you back then," Jared answers, meekly. "I loved you -- Richard, I loved you when we first started working together."

Jared exhales. It feels like such a relief to say. Richard smiles like he'd been hoping that was the secret all along.

\---

It takes six months, but Richard concedes to Jared's well-intentioned needling and hosts a housewarming party.

Dinesh and Gilfoyle are already contracted as keynote speakers at a conference (Richard hardly minds, he feared there wasn't enough space for them to stay the night and is, admittedly, thrilled that they've managed to stay relevant within Pied Piper) and Bighead is in Japan, for reasons Richard didn't fully understand from his friend's rushed explanation. But Erlich flies out at the drop of a hat, and Richard's parents and sister, Winnie, drive up for the evening as well.

"Look at how lovely," his mother sighs, looking at the planters Jared installed outside the kitchen windows.

"Irises," Jared and his mother say, appreciatively, at the same time. She grins like she knows a secret and takes Jared's hand in her own. Richard watches Jared flush red but still smile, almost triumphantly, as she leads him away somewhere else to talk.

Jared is still a bit winded, a bit dazed, to hear Richard refer to him as "my boyfriend" over dinner, to see the way Richard carefully checks in to make sure Jared gets a sizable portion for himself after all his flitting about, making sure everyone else is comfortably served first. Richard fits a loose hand around Jared's knee as they all talk, sprawled out on the couch, an old record playing - wobbly but warm-toned - in the corner. 

Richard's parents kiss them both goodbye as they head out, back to Tulsa for work the next day. Erlich and Winnie stay behind in old, cozy pajamas, prepared to stay the night.

"What if you get another genius idea," Winnie says, much later, in the middle of a game of canasta. "Can you work from out here, Richie?"

"What _if,_ " Erlich chortles, a bit bliss-drunk and red-nosed. "More like _when_. Richie's brain doesn't stop ticking away. I bet he's had a hundred great ideas in the last ten minutes." 

It's sweet, and far too kind, but not wholly untrue. Richard does scribble things in notebooks, leave windows open on his laptop full of new bits of code. Jared has noticed, and Richard has been too preoccupied to even bother trying to hide it.

"Would you have to go back to Palo Alto," Winnie asks, drawing a card. She briefly is distracted, showing off her successful hand. Erlich as her teammate slams a triumphant fist a little too hard on the small, wooden table, making his scotch dance in his glass. 

"I don't know," Richard exhales, looking almost pleadingly towards Jared, who seems strangely unfazed. "We're happy here. I wouldn't ruin - "

"We'd be happy anywhere," Jared answers, mercifully. He nods encouragingly back at Richard; so gentle, so attentive, so much kinder than Richard ever thought himself worthy of deserving.

Jared runs a hand down Richard's torso, tucked close together in bed once they've all finally retired in the early hours of the morning. Richard stifles a surprised little squawk.

"Jared," he chastises, without any ire. "My sister is in the living room."

"Mm," Jared says, unhelpfully, right into the most sensitive part of Richard's neck. Richard shudders and drags his fingernails, lightly, over the broad slope of Jared's shoulders. 

"Did you, um," Richard stammers, tucking his head beneath Jared's chin. He squeezes his eyes closed, is glad Jared can't see his pained expression, tucked so close against Jared's chest.

"It's okay, Richard, I know what you're going to ask," Jared says, pressing a brief, chaste kiss into Richard's mop of curly hair. "I would. Palo Alto. Anywhere. It doesn't matter." 

"I don't deserve it," Richard huffs, feeling his throat pinch tight, raked over some emotion he doesn't want to feel, some words he's too frightened to say.

"What if I do, though?" Jared asks. "What if I'm happy. What if -- what if this is exactly what I've wanted from the moment we met? Do I deserve it?"

Richard looks up at Jared, so placid, dreamlike, almost unblinking, in the grey-blue light of the not-quite-morning.

"Yeah," Richard says. "Of course." 

"And do you?" Jared asks, as Richard ducks his head again, pulls close. "Have some brilliant idea knocking around in there?" 

Jared feels Richard's lips, soft and warm against his collarbone, quirking up into a smile.

"I dunno," Richard hedges, in a way that conveys exactly what Jared had expected.


End file.
